My Suburban Destiny

BookGlutton.com — A social website where instead of commenting on articles (like digg.com), you comment on books.  You can even do IM with people who are reading the same book as you at the same time.

Pipl.com– Wh0 needs an address and phone book anymore? This is a free service and does better than just about anything at finding evidence of anyone on the internet.  Good enough for most applications.  On my name, it returns about 80% false matches (same name, different person).  But the remaining 20% is probably 70% of all the online accounts and profile pages that exist for me.

The last time I tried to get hooked into Sci-fi websites, I subscribed to mailing lists that spammed my mailbox with untargeted garbage, mailing lists full of strangers I will never meet, I subscribed to podcasts of irregular quality and RSS feeds that hit tripple digit un-read numbers overnight.  So now I try again.  Has web 2.0 and the social web saved the sci-fi cyberuniverse?

GoodReads. It has membership and is growing as fast as facebook.  The book club section is innovative, but not feature complete, i.e. could have better search aimed at in person book groups.

Shelfari. Beautiful site, Shelfari’s group section is useless for organizing in person book groups.

Library Thing. Groups and events are aimed at big organizations and big spectator events, like book stores, libraries holding book signings or author readings.  The other group features don’t seem to have any in-person features.

Publishers.
Just about all publishers sites offer catalogs, calendars (usually not iCal or otherwise subscribable), and newsletters.

Tor. Very impressive site with some social features, some free stories.

Baen. Free books, some free online content.

Random House. RH’s approach is to create a site as a bookstore. No obvious social features.

Del Rey. Part of RH. No obvious social features.

Amazon. Weak on science fiction specific features, but still the best place to buy books that aren’t available used.  The best social feature is the shared wishlists.

Pyr. Small publisher, uses FaceBook.  Better than nothing, suffers all the same problems that facebook does.

I’m excited about internet calendar applications, which at it’s heart, is all meetup.com is. So I’ve been dinking around with what can be done to manage..

- todo list items
- email (a mix of information requiring no action and implicit to-do items)
- calendar items (todo items with a start and finish date)
- contacts (a todo item with a person at the other end)

I also use a paper system– this means I’ve got 2 bins for collecting to-do items, a GTD no-no.

And how quickly the distributed to-do item database gets.  Here is the topology so far:

• Meetup → Google Calendars
• Google Calendars ↔ Outlook.  I’m using Google’s official synch tool.
• Google Email → Outlook.   I need to switch to IMAP because right now I use POP and I’m doing double deletion.
• Toodledo → Outlook.  I used to use Remember the Milk, but they don’t support Outlook, except as a calendar.
• Toodledo → Google Calendars
• Outlook → T-Mobile SDA Phone,  roughly one way synch of contacts, todo and calendar items.
• Google Calendars → Sunbrid on thumb drive (Pending…)
• Google Calendars → iCal on MacBook (Pending…)

Google to Outlook synch doesn’t seem to synch my extra calendars, so I’m going to upgrade to Outlook 2007 and subscribe to iCal URLs instead.

To be continued… trust me, I’ll put it on my to-do list.

They work better together because the DS can get game demos from the Nintendo Channel on the Wii.

The DS is a game for the far ends of the age spectrum– adults and younger kids, although there are plenty of in between games, too.

The built in application, Picto-chat is a missed opportunity. You can’t chat beyond 30 feet, you have to communicate with the other person by a separate channel before starting a conversation, if the other user is playing a game, you can’t signal that you’d like to chat (unless you walk over and tap them on the shoulder). If you are that close to each other, why not just talk? The only use I can think of for this is so that kids can communicate when situations dictate that they must not, e.g. in church pews, during lecture or when the parents are willing to put up with the noise.

As for adult games, I got the My Word Coach, My French Coach and My Spanish Coach. Several people tried out the games for a non-trivial amount of time, so they were unusually successful for essentially flashcard software. I want to get left-brain/right-brain to train my self to stop using my right hand so much, on account of my repetitive strain injury. I will probably order Brain Age next.

Internet was another missed opportunity. Setting up wireless is too hard. 5 year olds can’t be expected to type in a SSID. If an app was going to be built in, it should have been the Lynx text browser. Trying to implement Opera, a graphical browser on a DS was a fit of megalomania on Nintendo’s part.

People want to know if Cheetos are vegetarian– the question depends on if they use animal or microbial rennet.

People what to know what number to call to cash in their E trade points. You gotta call the number I list because if you call the number on the card, the service rep may claim it isn’t possible to cash in your E trade credit card points over the phone–where I have successfully done so several times.

People still browse my 53(!) toki pona posts. Seriously, aren’t there more competent toki ponists out there yet?

Somehow knowing all this makes it harder to decide what to write next. Clearly the often quoted advice to put your “greatest hits” somewhere prominent on one’s blog doesn’t apply to me.

Here is a description of the design and goals of a constructed language I’d like to work on.

Alzheimer’s and other dementias have no cure, although mental stimulation is thought to be a preventative measure.  Bilingualism delays dementia by four years.  Learning a full blown natural language is hard, taking 500 to 2000 hours of study. The most effective way to learn a language is through immersion, but few can afford to travel to a distant land for a long period of time.  From personal experience, many language learners get stuck in the permenant beginner mode because of the demotivating effects of trying to accomplish such a massive undertaking, especially without the motivating force of desperation and need that you find in an immersion situation.

If the doctor prescribes learning a language, maybe an artificial language would help, since an artificial language can be designed to reduce the grammatical and lexical burden put on a language learner.  The simplest language of course would be a dialect of one’s mother tongue–say–Pig Latin.  I suspect that the brain would use many of the same brain cells and dendrites to encode the dialect, so as they die during dementia, you’d lose English and Pig Latin simultaneously.  I propose that a fully non-Indo European constructed language with no relationship to the mother tongue would be the least likely to be lost.

Why not use Esperanto or some other pre-existing simple constructed language? Most importantly, I want to create a language. Secondly, Esperanto, is unusually easy for Indo-European speakers, is very hard for non-Indo-European speakers.  Esperanto’s “Indo-European-average” characteristics makes it especially unsuitable if my hypothesis that the protective benefits of benefits are limited for bilingualism between highly related languages as opposed to unrelated languages, proves correct.

Lexicon
500 canonical base words

Users have a wide variety of techniques they can use to create new valid words.

• Compound words are permitted and legal if understood, e.g. “animal-fur-pet” is a legal word for dog or cat, unless the person listening doesn’t understand
• Relative clauses are permitted to allow for substituting phrases for unknown words., e.g. Give me the “thing that one uses to cut paper”  And this technique can be applied recursively, e.g. Give me the “thing that one uses to cut those ‘things that are white, flat and rectangular’”

And more as I think of them…

Grammar
Grammar has several levels. The first level is “formalized word soup”(FWS)  A sentence is correct in FWS if it meets the criteria of a short list of rules.

Formalized Word Soup. FWS is based on a book I read… (citation forthcoming) where there were 5 rules to speak– actor comes first, related words are near each other, etc.  It is expected at this level for there to be significant bleed over from the parent language.

Pigdin Grammar. In this form simple constructions are expected to be grammatical, but for complex sentences, there may be bleed over from the parent language.  This form has no inflections, but has reasonably strict word order.  This form has a few dozen model sentences, (ala toki pona), and speakers are expected to shoe horn as many sentences as possible into the existing models.

Natural Grammar.  The natural grammar form has inflections.  This form may not really ever be completely defined until there is a significant population of fluent speakers who’ve spoken it since childhood.  I skeptical that our on-paper language definitions have achieved the ability to define as completely as whatever our brain is modeling.

Phonetics.
The language is multi-dialect by design.  The dialectical difference depend on the mother tongue of the speaker. That means a localization of the alphabet will be required for each natural language.  Rather than trying to teach ordinary people IPA and how to pronounce letters that their mother tongue lacks, they will only be expected to speak the constructed language in the localized dialect.  An example: In English, most people see the letter “a” and pronounce the dipthong “a-e”.  So the hypothetical word “pa” would be pronounced “pae” by an English speaker and “pa” by an Italian speaker.  Localizations are to be designed to minimize clashing between one localization and another and to minimize the difficult of pronunciation.

The language will use only the letters found on a Latin qwerty keyboard.  Including special characters is an insurmountable burden for too many people to consider their usage.

Sign Encodings.
Since the audience is people who will eventually become hard of hearing, the language has a sign component.

Ok, now I need to generate a dictionary.  Much work left to do.

Government.
The language will be governed by a committee of people who care.  The original charter will establish a route for language evolution and recommendation for “forks” or “dialects”  The original inventor could die or lose interest, so establishing a governing committee is important to prevent and resolve disputes in the community over the undefined and ill-defined parts of the language.

Here I post my methodology, in the next post I will create a language.

Review popular existing constructed languages (or maybe not–especially if you want to be original)

Grab a free dictionary.  The free Esperanto dictionary at the Gutenburg Project good place to start because it is free and if you use it as a starting point, you will have a tri-lingual dictionary. Also, I think to avoid the bane of the conlanger, accidental encoding (i.e. creating a code of your mother tongue), you should also create a thesaurus, Rogets is a good place to start.

Read up on the art of creating constructed languages, either at Zompist or the various pages about languages in science fiction.

Also, read up on the things that define a language, phonology–especially IPA, grammar and sometimes culture.  If you aren’t aware of your mother tongues grammar and phonetics, you’ll just reproduce it in the conlang you write.

If you don’t make an explicit choice about culture affects your language, you’ll end up with a language with the same metaphors, implicit judgements, etc as your mother tongue. Examples would be the “arugments are war” metaphor and the sexist masculate default pronouns found in English, which reflect either old or accidental ways of thinking influenced by the culture where the natural language evolved.  Two popular strategies are culture-neutral and constructued culture. The culture neutral strategy is very hard as abstractions are difficult to discuss without metaphors and using metaphors will inevitably lead to culture specific references.  An entirely constructed culture will almost certainly move your language into the category of “artistic” language, something that is pretty to look at, but unmotivating to actually learn.

Create an initial vocabulary.  Try to stick with common words and … words about grammar and language.  The early users of a new language usually are language hobbyists, linguists and are likely to do a lot of meta-language discussion.

Create a path. Learning a language is hard.  If your desired end product is a language description that is entertaining to read, then by all means, make it hard as you want to. Otherwise, you will want to have some gimmick to pave the way from not knowing the first word to knowing a lot, not knowing how to change them or string them together and not knowing how to pronounce them to being a fluent, talking, writing user of the language.

Write some texts.  The story of babel, lord’s prayer are popular texts, but I think people could be a bit more original.

Pick a license.

Release to the world.  Releasing to the world means building a community.  This is the first time you’ll have an audience and if you want a successful language, you should design the language with that audience in mind.

Are they casual conlang enthusiasts? Hard core philosopher logicians? Fans of the Captain Zubidido Comic?
Do they want to meet each other face to face? Are there enough enthusiasts to meet locally?
What experiences do you want to be able to experience while using the language? For example, a hypothetical goal of  toki pona was to achieve peace of mind and happiness whilst being incapable of thinking about anything overly complex.  The goal of Esperanto of course was to facilitate a conversation between a tourist and a native–particularly pairs of people who haven’t the time to learn a each others language, but both are willing to learn a third. The goal of loglan was to allow philosophers to talk to each other with the precision of mathematics and solve the problem of philosophers not being able to understand each other.  Artistic languages are for doing small amounts of translation and then enjoying the language (in song, in script) without necessarily understanding it fluently, e.g. toliken languages.

Go here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/utf-8-database-converter/download/

Get the utf-8 upgrader .  I went from 2.6 to 2.7 and it worked, despite the scary warning.  I haven’t checked every single post, but if your posts really are valuable, you’d have a backup mechanism, right?

Speaking of Wordpress 2.7, it seems that the UI of wordpress 2.6 was hiding the spam from me, which I guess was fine because half of it was spam and the rest were *angry* comments, although not spam.

Maybe a spam + troll filter would be a nice filter.

Mixed progress on last years resolutions.  Progress on my social calendar website was derailed by two job switches a bout of overtime, likewise the certification was derailed by two job switches, so the technology I was using at work and the test content I was studying got of of synch over and over.

Money
I resolve to save up some money to buy a house, but I’m not going to follow through with buying it unless it makes economic sense– the house I’d like now costs $180,000 but my spreadsheet says rent parity is $160,000.  I resolve to not sell a single share of stocks.  I resolve to finally consolidate all my 401K accounts.

Goofing Off and Travel
I resolve to play some Tomb Raider and Fallout 3.  I also resolve to figure out how to take a vacation to Iceland. I resolve to go to Bermuda, because it would be a nice holiday.

I’m thinking maybe  a radical 1/7 of my time should be dedicated to goofing off.

Languages
I’m currently expending various amounts of effort on 7 languages.  I plan to make progress towards fluency in Swedish and Icelandic, I plan to try to maintain some exposure to the rest in the form of podcasts, comics, movies, and watching English language movies with Spanish and French subtitles.  I resolve to bump up the number of potlucks I hold to maybe 24–that would be a stretch.

Health
My gym schedule has been thrown completely off track.  I resolve to do “more” wii fit and show up at Gold’s more often

Environment
I resolve to drive less and permanently bump up the amount of low carbon local food I eat, which should be easy because I like filberts, pecans and peanuts anyhow.